Gear maker

I see this in both the 1.9.1 and the beta 1.9.2.3. I opened a pdf that contains many compound curves. I did a Separate Curves from the menu. All nodes in the shapes show as being sharp nodes. If any one of the shapes are selected and the Close Curve is clicked then a handle from one of the end nodes jumps out to the location of one of the end nodes on one of the other shapes (except for the far left shape in the example in which the handle jumps off the canvas). This results in a huge spike in that area of the curve. But if instead the end node is moved out and back, then AD does an auto close and the handle does not jump out and no spike is created. test.afdesign

@mdfm28 As of yet there isn't a knife tool. Probably the easiest way, in my opinion, is to use the Expand Stroke to change the stroke into a closed shape with parallel sides. Then do a subtract. You would end up with a compound object so you would either click on Divide or Separate curves to make 2 separate objects.

@skmwrpThere isn't an automatic method. But, start with the widest stroke you have. Click on one of the 2 (unit unknown) stroke width lines, then in the menu Select Same>Stroke Width, this will select all the 2 unit widths. Then in the Stroke width field append a *2 or just enter 4. All the selected will change to 4 units. Then choose a 1.3 unit stroke and repeat the process.

@lb CakeSorry for the slow response, I've been doing some running around today. First I'm using a mac, so the numbers could be totally unrelated to yours. Opening AD beta in Separated Mode I am showing 285.2MB ram being used. Opening a new letter size document 349.0MB ram. Stretching the document to cover the 27" monitor shows 429.0MB ram (the blank letter document is fit to screen). Opening a large document 697.1MB. Having 3 large documents open 1022MB. My current project requires all 3 open and displayed at once. Okay I zoomed in one the main document and my usage went up to 1.07GB. Zooming in on all 3 documents 1.12GB. My RAM limit in preferences says I am limited to 12.288GB. I have 12GB of ram in my computer. I've never changed it. This is the first time I've ever actually looked at the ram used. I doubt that will help, but hope it does.

@lb Cake I have seen several reports of CPU spiking in some operations. Can't say I have ever watched my activity monitor to see what it was doing. Are you seeing loading times of a few seconds with a stripped down version of your file?

I have never had it do that, at least I've never noticed it. But it is doing it for me also. In a way it could be handy, lots of people ask if there is a way to change a curve back into a shape and the answer always is No, other than a undo. But this seems to do it. But, that doesn't help you. It looks like it does it to any rectangle or ellipse (and possibly other shapes). I found only one way to stop it. As long as the More says to flatten transforms, then any transform stops the conversion. If I put in a rotation or shear as small as .0001, then the conversion does not occur (.00001 didn't work). Not a perfect cure. I see that the rectangle and ellipse does not have to be converted to a curve when using this method. In fact the entire drawing can be selected and given a slight rotation (.0001) and it seems to stop all rectangles and ellipses from being converted. I don't know if this is a bug or if the svg spec calls/allows for this. I suspect that it is the latter.

It's weekend and they have been very busy, so it might take a couple days.

@akamii My guess is that Design Space is not liking the transform matrix in the SVG file. Go into the export and click on the More button. Try selecting the Flatten transforms. If this works make a preset with it flattened. You might also tell it to rasterize nothing while you are at it.

@Dandart The main problem I had was that when I tried to click on an exact spot. I'd line up the cursor exactly where I wanted it and the process of lowering my finger to make the click caused the mouse to move the cursor just before the click. By switching away from the Magic Mouse the cursor movement is different from the click, so I don't get that jump. Maybe you are seeing something totally different. What I was seeing there would be no way for the program to compensate for the jump, because the mouse was saying there was an intentional movement when there wasn't. If the program disregarded any small movement then it would not let me do a small movement.

@Ben Martin I didn't mention that this does look like a bug and should be entered in the bug reports for AD. Be sure to add the example of the icon to the report.

You're welcome. I'm glad it helped.

@JarrettI was doing a project and what I had to have was one path for the entire drawing. Basically as if you couldn't shut off the laser during a move. I made a preset for exporting SVG that solved many of my problems. I don't know if it will help you but you start with the More button at the bottom of the SVG export. Maybe some of the other options will help you.

I had a single crash today, that I couldn't reproduce. But maybe it will mean something to you. I was doing some playing with a shape and I held down the cmd+z to redo all the way back. Somewhere close to being all the way back boom AD was gone. One of the very first things I had done was a document setup changing the DPI from 96 to 192 with a rescale, that was the only thing that was somewhat unusual I did in the session. If you can't find it C'est La Vie. Not a problem. If I had used the navigation panel it probably wouldn't have happened, but I was being lazy and it had only been a couple dozen steps or less. Thanks guys! Crash 3-12-21.txt

@Jarrett, I've never used the Glowforge laser, but when I've done designs for my Shapeoko CNC router, I always try to have just one path for each cut. I have never found any automated way of doing this. Have you checked on the internet to see if there are any optimization sites to do this? I never searched for such, but it's an idea. The few times I've tried to use a program converting jpg to a vector, like Vectorize I found that the vectors were not very clean and were confusing. They required a lot of manual work to clean up. Redrawing it was usually easier once I figured out what my machine needed. I'm assuming the laser can shut itself off to move from one point to another without cutting. Which makes the redrawing fairly easy, usually. But then it does depend on how complex your design is.

@Dandart Not that I know of. When I first bought I was having the problem of moving things I didn't want to, and the only solution I found was to ditch the Magic Mouse.

I know but they have been working really hard this last year, or is it decade?

@Ben Martin Yes some exports, like to jpg and png seem to work. Others like to pdf, svg and eps don't. I've had little experience in having image masks. I have mostly have used vectors for masks and on those few image masks I've done in the past I couldn't tell you if they were able to be exported to pdf/printed or not. So one of the things I tried is to make the mask for the icon out of vectors, replace the image masks and then it seems to work. Otherwise I'm stumped if you've had them work before. Attached is what I came up with using a vector mask. Maybe someone else will figure this out. Sorry. Ambush modified1.afdesign

@Ben Martin I see what you are saying. I'm playing with it now. I'll be back.

@MiriamDema You are welcome. There are many people on this forum that are happy to help when issues come up. I've never attended a forum that had so many willing to help. One of the many valuable things about Affinity. If we are stumped one of the employees would come up with an answer, but shhhh they are probably asleep now.

@lb Cake I really don't think the issue of open or closed paths/shapes is an issue. In the second test file I used at least half are open curves. The first test file was almost all closed. Would it be possible to do some experimenting on your file? Making a copy first!!!!!!! Then delete say half the layers and Save as to another name, then see how it loads. Then try it again with the other half to see if it loads better. Maybe you can narrow it down to a section that is causing it to hang. And finally to a few layers. I'd love to hear what you find. Being 57MB I won't ask you to send it to me for me to try it on my system. But I think that would be really interesting. Sorry I'm out of ideas. Unless it's something that's Windows only... And I haven't read about such long load times in the forum before. Good luck on your searching. Let me know if I can help further.

@Ben Martin I have not seen or heard of this issue. Is it possible for you to attach one of these afdesign files so we can see what it's actually doing? Are you using the released or beta version?

Thank you for including the file. What I did was to select the 2 nodes on either side of the gap. Click on Break Curve turning each node into two nodes not connected. I separated the nodes slightly. Then selected the 2 left most nodes and clicked Join Curves Then the two right nodes and clicked Close Curves. I ended up with two layers, basically the insides of your object and the outside. I had to switch the order of these in AD so the outside was below the insides. Then selected both layers and did a Subtract. Finally I did a little tweaking of the nodes to get rid of the bottleneck I had created. Does this look better? MD2021Join modified.afdesign

@lb Cake I took a drawing of mine that has 5000 layers, some simple and many complex. Many with some fx and gradients. No pixel layers, vector only. File size (following a Save as) is 805KB. I opened the current AD beta, then timed how long it took to open the drawing. 3 seconds. I took a version that had some pixel layers 93.9MB (following a Save as) included, between 3 and 4 seconds. I did the test again with a AD vector only drawing of mine with 39,000 layers, no pixel or gradient or fx. Mostly simple shapes, a relatively few complex. A virgin copy of the beta was already open. This file was 12.7MB file size (following a Save as). 7 seconds. My computer is 13 years old (from 2009) with 12GB ram. That's why I am amazed in your getting load times greater than a minute. Just to try it I included the time to load the beta AD and then open the 39,000 layers and it was only 16 seconds. There has been some discussion in the forum concerning the loading time for AD the first time each day, so the result of this test may vary considerably. What else do you have open? I used QuickTime Player (I use a mac) to record the opening time and it slowed the loading of the 39,000 layers from 7 seconds to 17 seconds. Loading.mov

Wow, I see nothing that would lead me to figure such a large huge loading time. If it takes that long to load are you having huge redraw times when you zoom a bit into a drawing? That usually gets out of hand long before noticeable loading times for me. What OS, I'm assuming you are using Windows?

There are a couple ways to do this, I'd probably use the appearance panel to create a second stroke the color of the space between the lines. Or using an erase blending mode for the second stroke which would show what was behind the space between the lines.